Lone Parent Employment

: Unless I misunderstand the hon. Lady's point, there are two issues to address. First, what measures of poverty do we use—material, relative or absolute? Even the Government have acknowledged that none of those are perfect. They are, I believe, running those three targets alongside each other. The other point that I sought to make is that if some of our social security system is linked to prices and other parts of it are linked to earnings to deal with issues such as child poverty, we might unintentionally end up with some individuals on extremely low incomes. Considering that some lone parents' benefits in relation to their children might be more generous, but that they might have underlying price-linked benefits, we might also find it difficult to meet some of the extremely ambitious child poverty targets that the Government have set. The Government deserve some credit, not only for making those matters big priorities and allocating a lot of money to them, but for some of the detailed proposals in the new deal and other schemes that seek to help people back into the labour market. However, it is more interesting today to focus on where things are going wrong and what changes may need to be made in the future. That is the purpose of the debate, which comes on the back of the Green Paper. My first point was made earlier by the Conservative spokesman. Although the 70 per cent. target looks to be of the right order of magnitude if the Government are to address worklessness, the trends over the past decade make it difficult to imagine that they will hit that target. The Library has produced a good briefing note for Members, which shows the lone parent employment rate since 1995. That has two interesting aspects. First, that rate was increasing fairly markedly before the Government's arrival in 1997. It is clear, as the Minister generously acknowledged, that part of the improvement must be due to the generally improved state of the economy after the severe recession in the early 1990s. It is not clear from the chart that there was any particular acceleration in the improvement in the lone parent employment rate until 2003–04. The Minister may claim that there has been some distortion, or that is when her policies kicked in and started to look impressive. Secondly, about a year ago there seemed to be a pause in the rate of improvement in the lone parent employment rate. The Minister might be able to confirm that those figures are slightly out of date and that there has been an improvement, but the ““plateauing off”” in the lone parent employment rate would appear to coincide with the flattening off of the labour market as a whole, which has led to some 11 or 12 months of increasing claimant count over the past year. I do not seek to pretend that economies do not sometimes slow down under all Governments, and clearly we have had a long period of sustained increase in output. However, if the labour market continues to be weak and we continue to have such a plateau for several years, it seems almost impossible that we shall reach the Government's ambitious target by 2010.